But he could fire them, alternately or together, whenever Warrior's forward motion slid the pippers over targets.
The tribarrel caught a squad moving up at a trot to exploit pathways the sappers had torn. The Republicans were so startled by the bellowing monster that they forgot to throw themselves down.
Three survivors turned and fired their rifles vainly as the tank roared past fifty meters away. The rest of the squad were dead, with the exception of the lieutenant leading them. He stood, shrilling insane parodies of signals on his whistle.
The tribarrel had blown off both his arms.
Des Grieux's right thumb fired the main gun at another ragged line of Republican infantry. The 20cm bolt gouged the earth ten meters short, but its energy sprayed the sandy soil across the troops as a shower of molten glass. One of the victims continued to pirouette in agony until white tracers from a Federal machine gun tore most of his chest away.
Fires lighted by the cyan bolts flared across the arid landscape.
Hawes in Susie Q tried to follow. His tribarrel slashed out a long burst. Sappers jumped and ran. Two of them stumbled into mines and upended in sprays of soil.
Susie Q eased forward at a walking pace. Hawes' driver was proceeding cautiously under circumstances where speed was the only hope of survival. Halfway to the wire, a buzzbomb passed in front of the tank. It was so badly aimed that the automatic defense system didn't trip.
Susie Q braked and began to turn. Hawes sprayed the slope wildly with his tribarrel. A stray bolt blew a trench across Warrior's back deck.
A Rep sapper ran toward Susie Q's blind side with a satchel charge in his hands. The automatic defense system blasted him when he was five yards away, but two more buzzbombs arced over his crumpled body.
The section of the ADS which had killed the sapper was out of service until its strip charge could be replaced. The rockets hit, one in the hull and the other in the center of Susie Q's turret. Iridium reflected the warheads' white glare.
The tank grounded violently. The thick skirt crumpled as it bulldozed a ripple of soil. Susie Q's status entry on Warrior's right-hand display winked from solid blue to cross-hatched, indicating that an electrical fault had depowered several major systems.
Des Grieux ignored the readout. He had a battle to win.
Under other circumstances,Des Grieux would have turned to port or starboard to sweep up one flank of the assault wave, but the Republican reserves were too strong. Turning broadside to their fire was a quick way to die.Winning—surviving—required him to keep the enemy off balance.
Warrior bucked over the irregular slope, but the guns were stabilized in both elevation and traverse. Des Grieux lowered the hollow pipper onto the swale half a kilometer away, where the Republican supports sheltered.
Several of the armored cars there raked the tank with their automatic cannon. Explosive bullets whanged loudly on the iridium.
Des Grieux set Warrior's turret to rotate at one degree per second and stepped on the foot-trip. The main gun began to fire as quickly as the system could reload itself. Cyan hell broke loose among the packed reserves.
The energy liberated by a single 20cm bolt was so great that dry brush several meters away from each impact burst into flames. Infantrymen leaped to their feet, colliding in wild panic as they tried to escape the sudden fires.
An armored car took a direct hit. Its diesel fuel boomed outward in a huge fireball which engulfed the vehicles to either side. Crewmen baled out of one of the cars before it exploded. Their clothes were alight, and they collapsed a few steps from their vehicle.
The other car spouted plumes of multi-colored smoke. Marking grenades had ignited inside the turret hatch, broiling the commander as he tried to climb past them. Ammunition cooked off in a flurry of sparks and red tracers.
While Warrior's main gun cycled its twenty-round ready magazine into part of the Republican reserves, Des Grieux aimed his tribarrel at specific targets to port. The tank's speed was seventy kph and still accelerating. When the bow slid over the slope's natural terracing, it spilled air from the plenum chamber. Each time, Warrior's 170 tonnes slammed onto the skirts with the inevitability of night following day.
Though the tribarrel was stabilized, the crew was not. The impacts jounced Des Grieux against his seat restraints and blurred his vision.
It didn't matter. Under these circumstances, Des Grieux scarcely needed the sights. He knew when the pipper covered a clot of infantry or an armored car reversing violently to escape what the crew suddenly realized was a kill zone.
Two-cm bolts lacked the authority of Warrior's main gun, but Des Grieux's short bursts cut with surgical precision. Men flew apart in cyan flashes. The thin steel hulls of armored cars blazed white for an instant before the fuel and ammunition inside caught fire as well.Secondary explosions lit the night as tribarrel bolts detonated cases of rocket and mortar warheads.
Warrior's drive fans howled triumphantly.
Behind the rampaging tank, Rep incoming flashed and thundered onto Hill 541 North. Only one tribarrel from the Federal encampment still engaged the shells.
Federal artillery continued to fire. A "friendly" round plunged down at a 70° angle and blew a ten-meter hole less than a tank's length ahead of Warrior. Kuykendall fought her controls, but the tank's speed was too high to dodge the obstacle completely. Warrior lurched heavily and rammed some of the crater's lip back to bury the swirling vapors of high explosive.
A score of Rep infantry lay flat with their hands pressing down their helmets as if to drive themselves deeper into the gritty soil. Warrior plowed through them. The tank's skirt was now here more than a centimeter off the ground.The victims smeared unnoticed beneath the tank's weight.
Warrior boomed out of the swale and proceeded up the curving track toward Hill 504.
The main gun had emptied its ready magazine. Despite the air conditioning, the air within Warrior's fighting compartment was hot and bitter with the gray haze trembling from the thick 20cm disks which littered the turret basket. The disks were the plastic matrices that had held active atoms of the powergun charge in precise alignment. Despite the blast of liquid nitrogen that cleared the bore after each shot, the empties contained enormous residual heat.
Des Grieux jerked the charging lever, refilling the ready magazine from reserve storage deep in Warrior's hull. The swale was blazing havoc behind them. Silhouetted against the glare of burning brush, fuel, and ammunition, Republican troops scattered like chickens from a fox.